The individual’s sense of basic separation from his universe may be a perceptual illusion based upon inadequate concepts of sensing and knowing.
The physical situation which so largely slips through the net of factual language is that there is no independent observer. Knowledge is not an encounter between two separate things—a knowing subject and a known object. Knowledge, or better, knowing is a relationship in which knower and known are like the poles in a magnetic field.
Humanity is not one thing and the world another; it has always been difficult for us to see that any organism is so embedded in its environment that the evolution of so complex and intelligent a creature as man could never have come to pass without a reciprocal evolution of the environment.
If in physical fact man-and-his-environment constitute some sort of unified or polarized field, why do we not feel this to be so instead of feeling ourselves to be rather alien beings confronting a world?
The Fall comes about through an obsessive and continuous preoccupation with survival, and thus it is logical for the Regainer of paradise to say, “Whoever would save his life shall lose it.”
The paradox of civilization is that the more one is anxious to survive, the less survival is worth the trouble.
In the other, paradisal, vision the individual organism has a different sense of identity. It is not merely itself, bounded rigidly by its own skin. Its identity is also its whole field, which, in mystical terms, is to say that it is one with the universe, with the system of immortal life-and-death. In the light of this awareness the overplus of concern for individual survival fades away; the dust of busy anxiety settles, and the world becomes visible in its primal, or actual, splendor.
Jung’s psychology carries over too much of the notion that the mind or soul is inside the skin as some sort of dimension of the individual organism. Mind is also a vast network of social intercommunication wherein the individual is something like a transformer in an electric power grid.
We tend to ignore the significance of the ground, as well as its necessity. Hence the restless pursuit of pleasure as if it could be a constant figure, ignoring and making no allowance for its non-pleasurable ground. But there is no way of getting rid of the ground. It impinges upon our senses however much our conscious attention may attempt to avoid it.
This is the dramatic image of Brahma playing hide-and-seek with himself through all the ages of time, concealing himself with infinite ingenuity in the endless variety of apparently separate forms and beings, throwing himself away to recover himself with ever renewed surprise, plunging into ever more fantastically lost situations so that the finding again is all the more astounding.
It is concealed under the pretext of righteous wrath and the fear of Hell, and so, at the same time, it is concealed that the Devil is made in the image of those who imagine him. The lustful Pan or the devouring monster are aspects of man that cannot be denied. How must we seem to the animals upon whom we prey for food? The sensation of being threatened, spiritually, by a weirdly alien and incalculable power of malice is, above all, a symptom of unconsciousness—of man’s alienation from himself. Furthermore, inasmuch as he is unconscious of the Devil as his own image, he is the more apt to vent upon his fellows his fear of and fury at this disowned aspect of himself. This is why the acceptance of the Devil in and as oneself is a moral obligation.
When we adjust our lenses to watch the individual cells of an organism we see only particular successes and failures, victories, and defeats in what appears to be a ruthless “dog-eat-dog” battle. But when we change the level of magnification to observe the organism as a whole, we see that what was conflict at the lower level is harmony at the higher: that the health, the ongoing life of the organism, is precisely the outcome of this microscopic turmoil.
If we discover that there is some superior order harmonizing what seem to be conflicts at the level of our normal, individual consciousness, may not this new understanding upset our standards and weaken the will to fight? If we see that the Good of the world is not the victory of good over evil but, on the contrary, the tense polarity of good-and-evil in perpetual conflict, is it not possible that this will lead us to a recognition of the function of evil making it difficult for us to fight and hate it?
We see that this absolute separation of good from evil renders our choice between the two an ultimately perilous adventure. While this enriches life with a dimension of earnestness and momentousness hitherto unknown, it deprives the Divinity of all humor and playfulness.
Many mythologies envisage the goal of life as the “rememberment” of this original “dismemberment.” The human ideal becomes, then, the hermaphroditic or androgynous sage or “divine-man,” whose consciousness transcends the opposites and who, therefore, knows himself to be one with the cosmos.